Grant Foreman • The Five Civilized Tribes

Observing the progress of neighboring tribes who enjoyed the blessings of education, some of the Creek chiefs expressed the opinion that theirs was not advancing at the same rate and they exerted themselves to stimulate the interest of the people and the authorities in the establishment and maintenance of more schools. In April, 1847, Mr. Walter Lowrie, secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, visited Kowetah Mission and learned the wishes of the Indians. A contract was then entered into at the "Old Agency," between Mr. Lowrie as the representative of the Board of Foreign Missions and the principal chiefs then in council, for the erection of a manual labor school. It was estimated that the mission would cost $10,000, of which the Creek Nation would pay one‑fifth and the mission board the remainder. The Creek Presbytery was created, composed of Rev. Hamilton Ballentine, Rev. David W. Eaken, Rev. Robert M. Loughridge, and Elder John Lilly, and the first meeting was held at Kowetah Mission November 9, 1848. Mr. Ballentine was appointed to superintend the new Presbyterian manual labor school to be known as Tullahassee.

For a school site Mr. Loughridge purchased 70 acres of cleared and fenced land from Thomas Marshall. The building was constructed of brick, ninety-four feet long and thirty-four feet wide; it was three stories high, with a kitchen eighteen by thirty feet and two stories high. It was the most pretentious building yet erected in this western wilderness and was a formidable undertaking. Forty thousand feet of lumber was delivered by water at Fort Gibson; most of the supplies came from Cincinnati and New Orleans by boat, and 240,000 bricks were burned near by;⁠1 1,350 running feet of sleepers, 1,670 feet of p195 joists, and 1,376 feet of rafters were hewed out of the forests and used in the structure. Work on the building commenced in the spring of 1848, the corner stone being laid the next September 26,⁠2 and it was completed in time to open the boarding school accommodating eighty pupils on March 1, 1850, a day school in a smaller building having begun two months earlier.⁠3

The Baptists had been somewhat active among the Creeks for several years and Rev. Joseph Islands, a devout member of the tribe who lived and preached at North Fork Town, was highly esteemed by the missionaries of that church for his piety and industry. He died March 8, 1848, after the decease of his brother William, December 18, 1847, both of whose lives were given extended accounts in the columns of The Indian Advocate, a Baptist organ published at Louisville. William Islands was baptized March 23, 1845 at the time of a "religious awakening after a long curse of wickedness, drinking, and ball-playing." There were six Baptist churches in the Creek Nation in 1848. Besides the churches at and near North Fork Town⁠4 there was the Fountain or First Baptist Church on the Arkansas River near the Creek Agency; the Second Baptist Church on the opposite side of the Arkansas River; the Post Oak Baptist Church twelve miles from the agency; and the Elk Creek Baptist Church eighteen miles from the agency just off the road to North Fork; they had been much neglected, having to depend on the brothers Islands and a Negro preacher named Jacobs, until the missionary Americus L. Hay came in January, 1848 to organize the church and mission work.

Mr. Hay wrote from Fountain Church that the membership, 170, was so large that sometimes in the winter he was obliged to preach under an arbor. "There are many white people here, it being the principal trading place in the Nation. The improvements are larger and better than in other parts of the Nation." With the help of the Indians he built a schoolhouse. "My pupils" he said, "began in their alphabet. p196 I have the letters arranged into 'the musical alphabet.' The scholars commenced singing the letters; in one day eight learned their letters. In a few days all were spelling."⁠5 Hay, who was an intelligent, observing man, said that the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Delaware, and Shawnee Indians produced great quantities of produce. "These tribes are well supplied with farming implements, and many wagons among them. On Sabbath day, at many of the churches, a number of families have their carriages. At many of the trading houses, Indians are now employed as salesmen, and the simple trades are followed by some of the various tribes. . . . At present there are 600 white men among the Choctaws" and not twenty Christians among them, aside from the missionaries.⁠6

North Fork Town was a dense settlement between the Canadian and North Fork rivers, and the Methodists decided to locate their mission school there on the farm acquired from Mrs. Phips. It was on the south side of the North Fork of the Canadian River five miles above its mouth and included thirty acres of cultivated land, a good dwelling, outhouses and stables. In February, 1848 a contract was made with Webster and Reed of Fort Smith for the stone and brick work and in April a contract was entered into with J. J. Denny of Louisville, Kentucky to furnish material and do the carpenter work. The foundation was completed and the corner stone laid July 19. "The occasion was one of much interest to the Indians, many of whom attended, with several of the principal chiefs. Notwithstanding the day was very hot, the addresses and all elicited the closest attention from them. When they were told by a native speaker that this was what they had been trying to get for several years they responded most heartily."⁠7

More than a year was required to construct the main building, which was 110 feet long by 34 wide and included a basement of stone and three stories of brick. A ten-foot porch extended across the front of the building which contained twenty-one rooms. The structure cost more than $9,000, of which the Government furnished $5,000 and the Mission Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Louisville the balance. The furnishings for the school came from Louisville by water and were much delayed by the low stage of the river. School p197 had been taught in a log house while the mission structure was in course of erection. It was called Asbury Mission School and was opened in 1850 with a capacity of nearly one hundred pupils. The school was soon interrupted by the prevailing epidemic of measles and by a wind storm that cracked the walls of the building, from which teachers and pupils fled in panic. On "28th May our school broke up in great confusion, never, as I judge, to commence again."⁠8

But Asbury Mission school did reopen and for years served the tribe well. It flourished under the superintendency of Thomas B. Ruble and soon had 112 pupils, thirty-two more than it was equipped to accommodate. In October, 1855, the school entertained a visitor in the person of Bishop George F. Pierce, who had just arrived after a journey over the drought stricken country of the Cherokee and Creeks,

"a wild vacant country, dreary but for its beauty with here and there at long intervals, a hut or wigwam; and now, here is a large three-story brick building — a school-house — with superintendent, teachers, male and female, and an Annual Conference assembled within its walls! The bell rings, and we all descend to the dining-hall; the boys sit at one table, a teacher at the head; the girls at another, the guests at a third. All is in order; no rushing and jamming; and now every one at his place awaits in silence the invocation of blessing upon the bounteous board. . . . Nothing special occurred during the session [of the Indian Mission Conference] save the admission into the travelling connection of James McHenry — better known in Georgia as "Jim Henry," the hero of the Creek war in 1836. The lion had become a lamb — the brave a preacher. The War-whoop is hushed; the midnight foray is with the past; the Bible and the Hymn book fill the hands that once grasped the torch and tomahawk. The bold valiant savage, who spread consternation among the peaceful settlements on either side of the Chattahoochee, now travels a circuit, preaching peace on earth, good-will to men. . . . He does not like to allude to his past.

"One day a brother informed me that the Indian preachers wished to hold a 'council' with me, and requested me to designate an hour for the interview. I did so, not knowing what they wished. They came to my room at the appointed time, and seated themselves in grave silence. I waited in vain for them to open their minds. That is not Indian etiquette p198 on such occasions. They were waiting for me, and so I inquired about what matter they wished to consult, and learned that they only desired to talk with me in their own way about the Church and the schools and the wants of the nation.

"In the midst of our talk, Chili McIntosh — well-known in Georgia in the days of 'Troup and the Treaty' — came in. The son of an old chief, himself a chief, the Indians all rose, in respect to the man and his title. They called him General. I had seen him at my native town (Greensboro), in my early boyhood, when, in the native costume of an American Major-General, and accompanied by some fifteen or twenty of his warriors, he visited several places in Georgia. The boys and the ladies were all greatly impressed, during that tour, with his manly beauty. He was caressed, and dined, and toasted everywhere. He made a triumphal march through the country. In conversation I found that he remembered every incident, private, and public in his visit to Greensboro. Among the rest, I reminded him of a question proposed to him by my father, and told him how as a boy I was impressed by his answer. The question was: 'Is there any word in the Creek language for blaspheming the name of God?' The answer was: 'There is not.' He remembered the conversation and reaffirmed his answer, appealing to his countrymen for its correctness. They all agreed he was right, and with one voice declared that 'If an Indian wanted to say bad words he must talk English.'

"McIntosh had not the height or majesty of person with which my boyish fancy invested him in other days. Though not an old man, he is now very gray; has a mild, gentle face, more expressive of humor than of boldness, and looks as if he would like a joke better than a fight. In conversation he is entertaining, quick-witted, and ready at any time for a little fun. Wishing to hear him talk, I asked him various questions about his people, the country, the soil, and the prospects of the Nation. He says it is a much better country than the one they left, though, for years, the people were dissatisfied. On their removal, sickness prevailed, many died, and they decreased fearfully in numbers; but trial and experience reconciled them. They could not be induced to return. He said every man coming to that region must pass through a process of acclimation."⁠9

p199 McIntosh was rich and his family did not suffer from the privations and sickness that oppressed the great majority of the tribe. It is interesting to compare this impression Bishop Pierce received from McIntosh with that of Augustus W. Loomis, who came to Kowetah Mission in 1852 and taught for a year, "visiting the people in their homes and presenting the claims of the gospel through an interpreter." Said Mr. Loomis in his quaint little book: "This tribe was removed to their present country, from Georgia, within the memory of those who are now not far past the meridian of life. They were very reluctant to remove; sorry to leave their old fields and orchards, and the graves of their kinsmen and their braves. To this day, they talk much of the happy country from which they were drawn, as they express it; they discourse about its hills and valleys, and genial climate; and with it they are wont to contrast, depreciatingly, (like any homesick person,) the woodless and waterless country in which they are now settled; nothing is equal to what they had in Georgia; the summers here are hotter, the winters are colder, the rain is wetter, the crops lighter, the game scarcer, and their people are dieing off faster than ever before was known in the 'old nation.' "⁠10 In sentimental remembrance of the loved spots they left in their former home, they brought the old names with them and bestowed familiar appellations on the new places in the western country, that robbed them of some of their strangeness; and the nomenclature of their ancestral country became that of their new home in the West.

Surrounded by an abundance of the necessities of life, wrested from the soil by their prodigious industry, many of the Creeks were living a contented and fairly orderly existence. As a rule they lived in rude log cabins, having paid but little attention to more pretentious building; but there were a few wealthy men in the tribe whose houses were more imposing. Such a house was of a well established type, built of two log cabins under one roof, connected by a covered passageway and having a long gallery across the full length of the front.

The early Creek's establishment was primitive. If he had advanced to agricultural opulence, there was a little field of corn surrounded p200 by a worm rail-fence; at a remote part of his possessions near a stream or spring, often out of sight from the road or trail, his domestic establishment; a little garden and a melon patch; some peach trees; a cow pen, and a log pen covered with thatch for a stable. A small square log house with one room, covered with long narrow pieces of oak split thin for shingles, and these not nailed, but held in place by heavy poles laid along the roof. There was not a sawed board about the premises. The floor, if not of dirt, was of what was called puncheon — segments of logs split, hewed and smoothed on one side; seats were of the same material with sprawling legs driven into holes in the bottom. The table was made with a hatchet, of such boards as cover the roof, and they were fastened together with wooden pegs. The door had wooden hinges and a wooden latch. At one side of the room were holes bored into the logs, into which were driven wooden pins; with supports at the other end, these sustained the bed; on other pins higher up were placed split boards; articles of dress hung on the pins, and a few dishes were set on the shelves. Over the door, a well kept rifle rested on its wooden hooks. Perhaps there were two cabins in the enclosure or near together; if so, the chances were the owner had two wives — an arrangement permitted by tribal custom, in the event he was able to care for both.

Frequently the logs of the house were not closely laid nor chinked so that the wind freely circulated through the room; the more pretentious dwelling was chinked and daubed; mud prepared in a pit near by was thrown into the chinks between the logs and smoothed with the hands in place of a trowel. A fireplace built against the outside of the house was sometimes constructed as high as the mantel with stone, but more often with logs thickly plastered inside with mud; above that it was carried as high as the roof with sticks similarly plastered.

In the more pretentious double log cabin, the ten-foot passageway through the middle, usually floored, served many purposes. It was cool and airy in the summer; a place in which to sit during the day, or to sleep at night. Frequently through the warm weather the beds were arranged out of doors on a staging to keep the sleeper above the reach of vermin, and of the pigs rooting around the house; here they napped at noon and slept at night; while the trees defended them from the sun by day and the dew by night.

p201 A few standard domestic utensils sufficed; there was invariably the mortar made by hollowing out the end of a small log in which corn was crushed with the heavy wooden pestle, and with the corn they made their sofka or hominy. Shallow woven baskets for sifting and winnowing the grain; bowls and heavy spoons fashioned from wood. While they could cook over the fireplace in the house, that was usually done over an open fire out of doors.

When the members of the towns tilled their fields in common, each family was expected to do its share of fencing, plowing, planting and tending; it had its own crib, and these cribs were scattered about over the field. Crude vehicles were used by the poorer members of the tribe; sometimes cross sections of a log two feet in diameter with the heart chiseled out for the axle made the wheels for the primitive cart or wagon, to be drawn by oxen. Even the crotch of a tree, in the shape of the letter V, with the sharp end forward, and upright stakes set in to hold the load on made a vehicle to be dragged over the ground.

The prairie flowers and the moon were the almanac of the Indians. When such a flower showed itself it was time to plant this seed; when such another appeared another seed must be planted.⁠11 The days of important intervals were marked with sticks. Notice of an approaching busk or other public meeting was given by heralds dispatched by the town chief, with little bundles of sticks, one of which was left in each house, with the direction to throw one stick away every morning, and that morning on which but one stick remained they were to repair to the busk grounds; giving notice of an impending meeting was called "issuing broken days." The war of 1812, in which part of the Creeks fought against the United States, and a part of them for it under General Jackson, was called by the Creeks the Red Stick War; this from the fact that the warriors were assembled by means of bundles of red sticks which the rulers left in each house, and which were employed to mark the days until time to go to the rendezvous.

Their amusements were simple; the ball game was a test of skill between rival towns, which frequently developed into riots in which heavy hickory ball sticks were sometimes used as clubs upon the p202 heads and naked bodies of adversaries until they were covered with blood. Dances and races contributed to their simple gaiety. The Indian at play or in feats of valor dissembled his pride of achievement with nonchalance; a traveler observed some of them in Van Buren: Some were racing their ponies through the streets for the mere excitement of the thing. Here you might see half a dozen swarthy faced young men, with long black hair floating over their bare shoulders, spring upon their backs, and with a wild screech fly up the road, whooping and yelling till their noise dies away in the distance.

"We have forgotten them and are occupied with other scenes, when suddenly in an opposite direction we hear the same frightful screeching and clattering of hoofs, then we see the foaming horses plunging furiously towards us, and on even to the hitching rail, where they halt in full career, and the riders slide down their sides, turn the bridle rein over the pony's head, hang it on the hitching peg, and lean themselves against a post or the side of the house, and, with eyes dropped upon the ground and one leg twisted around the other, they at once appear as listless and unconcerned as if they were alone by their own cabin in the woods."⁠12

The Creeks were gregarious and enjoyed their barbecues and camp meetings. The most important gathering was the busk, an annual feast at the town busk ground to which all reappointed. On this occasion they renewed their fires by rubbing pieces of wood together and from this they lighted all the fires used during the feast, and each family was expected to carry home some of it in order to keep disease and bad influence from the house. Water was drawn from the spring into which the medicine man blew a blessing through his reed, and the people all drank of it, supposing they were imbibing health-insuring draughts.

They were in session several days and nights, and one of the days was devoted to drinking a decoction passed around in a large vessel and known as the black-drink⁠13 made of roots and herbs boiled together and designed to operate as an emetic. A large feather accompanied the vessel, which was used by those who preferred to have their sickness p203 soon over. This day of cleansing was followed by the days of feasting and dancing. Houses were arranged around the sides of the square and facing inwards, and in the center a fire was built, around which dancing took place. The old Indians claimed that the Great Spirit gave them the dances and therefore they were bound with religious care to observe them and to teach them to their children. Some of the dances they said were learned from the bears; others were communicated to them from heaven, for it would be impossible, they said, for man ever to invent anything so intricate and so ingenious. The dances were mostly by night and by the lurid light of the great fire in the center.

The Creeks were a peace-loving people and had a shrewd appreciation of the blessings of quiet and tranquillity and both by precept and example they came to exercise a wholesome influence on their indigenous neighbors — more than did any of the other ingredients.⁠14 Capt. Indicates a West Point graduate, Class of 1832: a link to his biographical entry in Cullum's Register.

Indicates a West Point graduate, Class of 1832: a link to his biographical entry in Cullum's Register.

R. B. Marcy related that he had "learned from a Creek chief (Echo Hadjo) that his nation in a council with the Comanches, represented to them the fact of the rapid decrease of the buffaloes and that in a few years they would be almost entirely exterminated; when their present means of subsistence would be gone; and they and their children would be compelled to resort to some other modes of living; at the same time urging upon them the importance of abandoning their wandering habits, and learning to cultivate the soil. Thus the Creek Indians who are feared and respected by the prairie Indians, appear to have their interest and welfare at heart, and exercise a very salutary influence upon them."⁠15

The Creeks met the prairie Indians in a number of important peace councils and they and the Seminole were frequently called on for advice by the Comanche. In the spring of 1853 the Comanche Indians with 200 lodges were encamped in the Wichita Mountains. They sent messengers to the Creeks soliciting them to join in a council. But the Creeks a day or two before had sent Jesse Chisholm to the Comanche camp to make an appointment for the Grand Council fifty-five days from that time to be held at the Salt Plains which was intended to be p204 an extraordinary occasion.⁠16 In June 1500 Creeks departed for the Salt Plains to attend this Grand Council where large numbers of Comanche and other prairie Indians assembled.⁠17

The Author's Notes:

4 A protracted meeting by the Baptist Church at North Fork Town began on July 7, 1848. There were sixty camps on the ground. The meeting lasted four days and was attended by 1,500 people. The twenty-three who united with the church on that occasion included Gen. Chilly McIntosh (Fort Smith Herald, July 26, 1848, p2, col. 1).

8 Jarner to Lea, July 1, 1851: Report of commissioner of Indian affairs for 1851.

9 George B. Smith, The Life and Times of George F. Pierce (Nashville, 1888), p225.

11 On the prairies of Oklahoma grows a luxuriant purple flower known as the Osage Almanac; this from the fact that when the Osage bands were far from home on their buffalo hunts, and they saw this flower blooming they knew the toothsome green corn was nearly ready to harvest and it was time to return home.

13 Black drink ("Carolina tea," Catawba Youpon; Creek assi-luputski; small leaves, commonly abbreviated assi), a decoction, so named by British traders from the color, made by boiling leaves of Ilex-Cassine in water (Handbook of American Indians, I, 150).

14 For an account of the efforts of the Creek Indians to establish peace among the prairie Indians, see Advancing the Frontier, op. cit.

16 Fort Smith Herald, April 30, 1853, copied in St. Louis Republican, May 14, 1853, p2, col. 1.

17 Indian Advocate, June 1853, p3. This "grand council" held in July was attended by Comanche, Kiowa, Kichai, Creeks, Delaware, Shawnee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Indians. Jesse Chisholm was selected as interpreter for all of them ( Indicates a West Point graduate, Class of 1841: a link to his biographical entry in Cullum's Register.

Indicates a West Point graduate, Class of 1841: a link to his biographical entry in Cullum's Register.

Whipple's Journal: Report of Explorations for a Railway Route from the Mississippi river to the Pacific Ocean, by Lieut. A. W. Whipple, p19).

[ Creek ]

p194 Chapter fourteen
Accounts by Observers

The Author's Notes:

[ Creek ]

p194 Chapter fourteen Accounts by Observers

The Author's Notes:

p194 Chapter fourteen
Accounts by Observers